Recently I started experiencing an issue where my project that has been in the works for a couple of years now was suddenly using about 9GB additional RAM. This made it impossible to play standalone because the Editor + the Standalone game process was bumping up against my page file and causing an “Out of Memory” crash every time.
After dolting around on the internet for a while and then remembering that stat mem exists in the console, I discovered that the 9GB usage was being eaten by navigation. But I have no navigation setup and nothing should be checking navigation anyway. So I started digging and eventually found in World Settings an option labeled “Auto Spawn Missing Nav Data”. Turning this off cleared the entire 9GB of memory.
Now the issue and question. What exactly is the function of a rubber duck? No but actually it turns itself back on every time I restart the editor. The only way to stop it was to disable nav with Null Nav Sys Config and I have not messed with nav yet so my questions are as follows:
Will this interfere with my ability to add, or impact the functionality of, nav volumes I place in the future for “AI” (regular NPCs/Enemies)?
Will this affect the player’s interaction with the world? It’s my understanding that nav is just for npc logic.
Where did this even come from? It was not an issue until now and I have not messed with any nav settings so I have no idea what I did to trigger the issue in the world and/or the nav/project/world settings.